About the author

Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus. He is best known as the creator and editor of the popular economics blog Carpe Diem. At AEI, Perry writes about economic and financial issues for American.com and the AEIdeas blog.

Interactive map of every recorded meteorite impact on Earth

Ramon Martinez of Health Intelligence created the visualization above displaying every registered meteorite that has impacted on Earth. A total of 34,513 meteorites has been registered, most of them (33,277 meteorites, 96% of total) with a mass less than 10 kilograms (22 pounds).

MP: Notice that the United States seems to be the main meteorite target?

Discussion: (10 comments)

This shows “recorded” meteorite strikes, so the U.S. isn’t the main target, we just do a better job of identifying meteorite strikes. Siberia, for example, has relatively few recorded strikes simply because it’s so inaccessable to researchers.

Spot on. It’s really a map of those populated areas that report strikes.

Which is also what comment 1 is implying.

The one that always gets me (and I admit, that’s because I’m a metals geek) is that pre-iron age societies usually did seem to know what iron was. But the only source pre iron smelting would have been fragments of metorites. Thus I conclude that odd bits of iron from meteorites were, while rare, more common than we in the modern world might think,

Interesting, we notice the biggies – but how many smaller “landings” go undetected. As a kid I was a rock hound and collected hundreds of small rocks that all looked the same – I was always told they were bits of meteors – which made me scrounge for them even more. Too many landed in the washing machine and mom threw them all out.